Abstract: A system and method for translating a written document into a computer readable document by recognizing the character written on the document aim at recognizing typed or printed, especially hand-printed or handwritten characters, in the various fields of a form. Providing a pixel representation of the written document, the method allows translating a written document into a computer readable document by i) identifying at least one field into the pixel representation of the document; ii) segmenting each field so as to yield at least one segmented symbol; iii) applying a character recognition method on each segmented symbol; and iii) assigning a computer-readable code to each recognized character resulting from the character recognition method. The character recognition method includes doing a vector quantization on each segmented symbol, and doing a vector classification using a vector base. A learning base is also created based on the optimal elliptic separation method.